TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Sunday, August 29, 2004

2:06 PM
Posted by jodi rose

Forest outside Vilnius
woke up late, caught the midday bus - which left at 1pm - out to the forest. arrived at the summer cottage of some friends of vilma, who had lunch set up for us - about 20 media artists from all over the world, then we walked into the forest.
Gediminas told me about a sacred healing spring, and a group of us walked along the river to find it - sloping grassy bank, wet and slippery, I almost fell in twice - but we didn't find the spring. Came back to the camp area, in an oak grove, where a huge international pagan festival took place 5 years ago. these are some of the wise oak trees, ingelunas told me, that people would come to ask advice.
Then the streaming started - Nils asked me to be his assistant, so I had to make the list of performers and organise people to get in front of the camera - essentially a live tv broadcast from the forest to the contemporary art centre. The first part was fine, developed into a discussion with Daniel Anjucar, Geert Lovink and people from the workshop talking about media and the forest, then we had to wait an hour or more for the next bus to arrive with our second group of performers. By the time they got there everyone was hungry and it was total chaos, and most of the audience defected to the fire and bbq area while the performers played.
we made another list - with help from the lovely Tautvydas and managed to set up the video projector, screen, and audio for Sara Kolster and Derek Holzer to do their performance, while Gintas K and John Grzivich did electronic laptop music.
Walking back to the bus was amazing, it was completely dark in the trees, muddy track, Denis sang for us in Russian, then once we got out onto the road the almost full moon silhoutted against the hills and the mist floating around us, totally strange and beautiful.